Wednesday, November 10, by the greatest of luck, I find myself at the Gilles-Vigneault theater in Saint-Jérôme to attend the performance of Kiss by playwright Michel Marc Bouchard. I am well seated in a comfortable seat, and here is that by way of introduction, the presenter informs us of the contents of the play, the cast, the author, the actors and the sanitary measures of customary time of day. pandemic.
After catching her breath, she launches with conviction the famous phrase heard many times in public places of the metropolis, specifying that we are indeed in unceded indigenous territory. A dull rumor echoed in the room. The unexpected movement of the seated bodies becomes clearly perceptible in the vast amphitheater. Pause. Then follows a long litany of thanks which underlines the contribution of the donors who generously collaborated in the production of this show. After a real and obscure discomfort, the list becomes endless. Then we move on to true silence, the one that transports us to total darkness, the one in which the theatrical imagination unfolds.
Several days after seeing this performance persists in my mind this strange rumor of the room reacting to the foreword of the theatrical play. What does this tangible discomfort come from a crowd of at least 500 people to whom we have addressed no more and no less a form of “complaint” mean?
Many writings and words have been spoken in the public space concerning this famous “injunction addressed to the people” on the fact that it is henceforth in a common space built on an unceded indigenous territory. It is undeniable that the land claim of the First Nations peoples who were dispossessed by the colonialist conquerors carrying royal prerogatives remains a glaring and legitimate topicality. Their fight receives the support and support, without hesitation, of anyone who has to do battle with any power that is shamelessly enriching itself on the backs of the subordinates, the colonized, the citizens of low status and, by the fact. even, populations that have been dispossessed for ancestral generations of their own living space. That is not the point. Would there not rather be a misunderstanding on the formulation of this claim posed as a moral injunction which only once again deflects attention from the real problem?
Catholic dogma
Let us return to the unease, which perhaps finds its source in the evocation of a memory linked to the cultural history of the French-speaking populations who also occupy these territories. I will not hide from you that the public who attended the performance had an average age detectable by the presence of gray heads in the audience. And I include myself in this average. This population of “settlers-middle-class-French-speaking” was brought up in large part in submission to Catholic dogma.
When we hear in any introductory speech to a collective activity a sentence which indicates that there is fault in the residence, that, for example, we occupy a space which is not ours, that we should give up our place, easy to recognize in it a rhetoric aimed at indicating that a collective fault has been committed. Especially since this request places those who receive it in a situation where the recipient cannot respond to the request. How to cede a territory of which we do not physically own? And here we are indeed placed in front of a moral order. We are sinners, and since we cannot concretely escape reproach, we remain at fault forever. It should be remembered that it was all the more indecent to hear this moral prescription as an interminable list of names of companies, businesses and wealthy people echoed in this guilty space. Easy to understand that they are saved and free from faults by their sincere pecuniary repentance.
Let us try to bring back this contradiction that we lodge in the symbolic space on the real plan of life, where Aboriginal peoples and peoples of French-speaking nations have rubbed shoulders for more than 500 years. What if this famous injunction rather took the form of educational information followed by a concrete list of measures? For example, it could be announced that a percentage of the ticket price and a share of donations from “generous” contributors would go to the indigenous peoples concerned. This would overturn the moral proposition of “you are sinners, repent” with a constructive assertion that today’s society, including its economic and political decision-makers, would commit to paying a percentage of its revenues to those. who urgently need to be considered as full citizens in a country that we currently jointly occupy. Urgently, the task becomes collective.